


Until you meet yourself

by Rattle



Series: Will Power [1]
Category: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Happy Ending, Mutual Pining, One Shot, Oral Fixation, Oral Sex, some damn good soup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-15 14:48:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28940214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rattle/pseuds/Rattle
Summary: It's loud in his head. She makes it quiet.
Relationships: Sebastian/Female Player (Stardew Valley)
Series: Will Power [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2158782
Comments: 10
Kudos: 151





	Until you meet yourself

Daytime is loud. Sebastian sleeps through it and works deep into the night instead. As the code compiles, and he waits for errors, he hears things. There’s angry otherworldly howling, with mournful notes thrown in. Something scratches at the high and tiny basement window. 

Sebastian puts his headphones on. There’s things he’s scared of, but these don’t howl. They say, _Why can’t you be more like your sister, boy_ , and wince as he enters or leaves a room. 

They all love his sister. _Half sister, half sister, half-a-sister._ Maru’s smile is shiny, and her future is bright. She’s daddy’s little girl. And he’s irrelevant. Everyone looks at Maru, everyone looks up to Maru. Except her. As Maru talks, as his mother shoves the money into the cash register and fumbles for change, as he is frozen in the doorway, a beating heart in one hand and a can of soda in the other, she looks at _him_. 

“Hello, Sebastian.”

There’s freckles on her bare shoulder. He thinks of how much he wants to count them with his tongue. And then he thinks about how much he wants to stop thinking. He stumbles back down the stairs to his room and shuts the door, very quietly, lest it scream out secrets about him. 

People are loud, too. Sometimes, insufferably loud. Some are louder than others. Some are loud even when they’re not talking. But she is quiet. Even when she speaks. 

Her hands are rough and scratched and bleeding in places. Sebastian wants to do something about it. He takes his old motorbike gloves and brings them to her doorstep, and leaves them there. They’re well worn out, which makes them soft and comfy. It later occurs to him that they’re not really fit for gardening work. And, also, that her hands are so much smaller than his. He feels stupid. But the next time he sees her outside the house, waiting for his mother to bring timber from out back, she’s wearing them like mittens. And pressing them to her nose and mouth. Sebastian hides behind the wall and takes a long way round. He still feels stupid. But he feels something else, as well. 

She comes over sometimes. Rarely just for a transaction. Sometimes he sees her. Sometimes he only hears her, and sits quietly in his room, eyes closed, tasting the echo. 

Her laughter sounds like a song. He’d like to have sheet music to it, and play it legato, all alone, to ground himself. Sometimes he’d like to hum it in the shower. 

She brings stuff from her farm, too. To mum, mostly. Seasonal fruit and forage; one time, a weird looking stump. Rocks and chunks of metal for Maru. A tight, fake smile for his stepfather. 

But this time, it’s something only for him. A jar full of earthy orange. 

“It’s just soup,” she says and shrugs. Apologetically? 

This one is his favourite. But she couldn’t have known that. He tried it once, during a city outing, in a small cafe, as Sam was scarfing down fries drenched in melted cheese, oblivious to the look in Sebastian’s eyes. It must have been Sam who told her. Was it?

“Say thank you, boy,” his stepfather commands. Sebastian ignores him. He looks at her and smiles, and hopes she’ll know, and she smiles back. He wants to kiss that smile. He wants to fade away. 

In the middle of the night he creeps into the kitchen and heats the jar’s contents in a saucepan.

The soup is sweet and savory and thick and creamy and excruciatingly good, and Sebastian moans a little as he swallows the second spoonful. He eats the rest right out the saucepan, scraping it greedily, not wanting to rush, but unable to slow down, all the while thinking: _she made this. She made this for me._ He wants to also think, _she imagined me tasting it_ , but dares not. 

Sea is calm. He’s not. Drumbeat of rain across the black surface. Shapes under the water. His head is full of ruckus. His cigarette goes out. It’s soaked. Sebastian crushes it underfoot. 

She is quiet in her movements, timid, as she approaches and stands next to him, and water is streaming down her face and into her slightly open mouth. He takes a step sideways toward her and opens an umbrella. 

He doesn’t know how, but her presence makes it quiet. Makes it all quiet. 

“May I come see you sometime, Sebastian?”

By her tone he realises, _only you._

“Yes,” he says. “Always.” It wouldn’t have been true before. But _always_ needs to start somewhere, might as well now. 

Sam’s never told her a thing. But she did sit in his living room, he says, and stared at pictures for very long. Pictures of the three of them, him, Sam and Abigail, during a quite miserable gig. Pictures of Sam with Sebastian in the background. Family pictures, not so much. Then she called herself a “disgusting creep”, started crying and left. Sam was “super confused” but then he found a bag of homemade kettle corn she'd left, so s’alright, he said. 

He’s yelling now. “No, wait, why did you take her there? She’s not supposed to go there. There’s traps.”

“Maybe she got distracted.”

“By w-w-fhat?” Sam squeezes the dice in his hand, knuckles white. 

“By the wizard. Maybe she wants to get closer to him. Maybe… Maybe she tries right now. She reaches to kiss him.”

As she talks, she’s looking right into his eyes. He doesn’t feel like blinking. 

Sam all but screams, “That’s not how… Kiss, what, seriously?! There’s a pit!” 

“There’s a pit,” she agrees.

“Uhm. Roll for dexterity?” mumbles Sam. 

She rolls a two. Her facial expression: tragedy. The corner of Sebastian’s mouth twitches. 

“So you, like, stumble and fall down that pit. With lava. And die! I guess! Horribly,” Sam declares, eyes like saucers. 

“Okay,” she says. 

Her toes roll a natural twenty, and Sebastian doesn’t pull away as they crawl up and down his shins under the table. 

He avoids mirrors. He’s not going to see anything he might like in them. What is there to see? Bloodshot eyes, hollow gaze, sunken cheeks, ribs protruding? He looks barely alive. He looks like zombies do in comics. He’s ugly. 

“So beautiful,” she tells him as her fingers move a strand of hair away from his face. Without actually touching his skin. “You are so beautiful, Sebastian.” 

He almost believes it, because it’s _her_ saying these words. He wouldn’t have believed anyone else. 

They never spend a lot of time together. Their paths collide and diverge, all in the confines of a small town. 

Today is different. Her hands grip his waist and Sebastian thinks about them more than he thinks about anything else right now, and swears he can hear her heavy breathing even through the wind, even through the old and scratched helmets, even through the roaring of the bike. They’ve never been this close before. He’s okay with being this close now. 

On the precipice, she stands and folds her arms and looks at the city. He pretends to be looking at it, too, but, instead, stares at her lips and waits for them to move. 

The whole of his existence is a trap. His room inside that house, inside that town, inside that valley; a multi-layered cube drenched in well-wishers and green. 

“The town isn’t a trap, Sebastian. But that is.” She gestures to the lights. 

From afar, the city looks so beautiful, so imposing, so enticing. 

She tells him of different traps. Of cubicles, of “corporate culture”, of modern slavery, of choking despair, and lack of sleep, and lack of air, and lack of hope. And of how loud, horribly loud it always makes things. 

Tears stream down her cheeks as she speaks. Sebastian reaches absentmindedly and wipes one off with his thumb, then puts it to his mouth. Her words and breathing stop.

“I’m taking you back,” he says. _I don’t want you to cry anymore,_ he thinks. _Ever._

He finds her in the forest gathering wild bilberries off a bush. There’s a jar by her feet, but barely anything ends up in it. Her smile is mischievous. She beckons for him to join her, wordlessly, and he kneels, and reaches, and plucks a berry, and looks at it in wonder.

Her hands are frozen in midair. His hand, he brings to her mouth, to her warm lips, stained deep blue, almost black, and watches, without breathing, without blinking, as they open to accept the offering. For half a second, he feels her pulse on the tip of his forefinger. 

Sebastian hears the berry’s skin pop on her tongue, and imagines the sweet juice spreading. His mouth is dry and wet at the same time. She does the same for him, and then does it again. And then stops doing it. 

They kiss until the taste of bilberries is washed off their tongues completely. 

“May I… Please…” she whispers and then trails away, and takes him by the hand to drag him to her house. Her palms are rough and calloused now. Sebastian wants them on his body the way he’s never wanted anything before. He hisses and closes his eyes when he gets his wish. Then he’s free to remember another, the one that’s been alive for longer. 

He cannot stop. His tongue is a whirlwind. Until she’s hoarse, until her sharp moans turn into tiny, broken mewls, until her body is no longer tense, but weak and soft and pliant and exhausted in his arms. When she emerges for air, she breathes, “So good. So good to me.” But that’s his line. 

“Taste me,” Sebastian pleads. And works himself frantically, and comes on her obediently outstretched tongue. He orders his eyes to stay open, to not miss a single thing. He doesn’t need to order his brain to remember, this is a sight he will never forget. He plunges one last time and lingers inside her mouth, until it all becomes too much. 

Later on, he lays her on her side and fucks her from behind, unhurriedly, in slow, deep, delicious strokes, one hand around her breasts, pressing her closer; the fingers of the other, probing her mouth in time with his hips. 

Head cradled in her lap, finger weakly tracing the outline of a long and narrow and twisted gastropod shell on her thigh, Sebastian slowly fades away. He’s happy. It’s so quiet. He wakes up to bright daylight filling the room. 

“You probably want to leave,” she whispers upon seeing him squint. He’s a basement dwelling creature, and she knows it, and sunlight blinds him. 

“No,” he says. “I’m staying.”

**Author's Note:**

> do you happen to have a sebastian-shaped request for me to write? let me know.


End file.
